Sometimes I’ll be halfway through rewatching *Westworld* for the third time when my partner walks in and asks, “Aren’t there any other sci-fi shows on HBO?” It’s a fair question. Everyone talks about the big names — *Game of Thrones* had its dragons, *Westworld* had its robots, and *The Last of Us* brought zombies to Sunday nights. But HBO’s been quietly building this incredible catalog of science fiction that goes way beyond the obvious hits.
Last month, I was digging through HBO Max (sorry, “Max” now — still getting used to that rebrand) and stumbled across *Raised by Wolves*. I’d heard whispers about it online but never committed to watching. What a mistake.
The show opens with these androids crash-landing on a hostile planet, tasked with raising human children from embryos. Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong. Within twenty minutes, you’re questioning everything about consciousness, belief systems, and what makes someone a parent. The android Mother, played by Amanda Collin, becomes this fascinating study in artificial intelligence developing beyond her programming. She’s nurturing one moment, terrifyingly protective the next.
The visual design alone deserves mention — these stark, geometric structures rising from alien landscapes that look like architectural fever dreams. I actually tried sketching some of the ship designs after watching, partly to see if they’d make sense from an engineering standpoint. They do, mostly. The attention to detail in how these machines move, how they process information, how they make moral choices — it all feels grounded despite the surreal setting. That’s exactly what good sci-fi should do.
Then there’s *Barry Lyndon*… no wait, that’s not sci-fi. See what I mean about getting distracted?
*Avenue 5* is another gem that got buried under Netflix noise. It’s Armando Iannucci (the guy behind *Veep*) taking his razor-sharp political satire and launching it into space. The premise: a luxury space cruise ship gets knocked off course, turning an eight-week journey into a three-year nightmare. What makes it brilliant isn’t just the comedy — though Hugh Laurie as the fake captain is perfect — it’s how it explores what happens when people realize their comfortable world is actually fragile. The passengers’ slow descent from entitled tourists to desperate survivors feels uncomfortably relevant these days.
I remember watching one episode where they’re debating whether to jettison human waste to change their trajectory, and thinking, “This is probably exactly how these decisions would actually get made.” No heroic speeches or dramatic music — just committee meetings and PR concerns and people worried about their stock options. It’s mundane in all the right ways.
*Perry Mason* isn’t technically sci-fi, but bear with me. The recent reboot creates this alternate 1930s Los Angeles where technology and social change moved slightly differently. It’s subtle worldbuilding — different cars, different fashion, different social dynamics — but it creates this uncanny valley effect where everything feels familiar yet wrong. That’s harder to pull off than you might think.
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For something completely different, *Lovecraft Country* takes cosmic horror and grounds it in very real historical trauma. I’ll admit, I was skeptical at first. Lovecraft’s original stories are… problematic, to put it mildly. But the show uses that cosmic dread — the fear of vast, incomprehensible forces — and applies it to the very real horrors of 1950s America. When the monsters are both literal and metaphorical, both supernatural and institutional, the horror hits differently.
The episode where they’re trapped in that haunted house while also dealing with sundown towns and racist cops? Terrifying on multiple levels. It’s sci-fi that doesn’t let you escape into fantasy — it forces you to confront how the fantastic and the mundane intertwine.
*Years and Years* deserves special mention, even though it’s technically a BBC production that aired on HBO. Russell T. Davies created this near-future family saga that feels less like science fiction and more like a documentary from five years in the future. Rising sea levels, economic collapse, authoritarian politics, new technologies changing how we connect with each other — all filtered through one extended family’s experience.
What struck me most was how realistic the technology felt. No flying cars or laser guns, just incremental advances in phones, VR, biotech. The character Bethany, who wants to upload her consciousness and become digital, isn’t presented as crazy or visionary — she’s just a person making choices with the tools available to her. That matter-of-fact approach to transhumanism felt more unsettling than any monster movie.
The show aired in 2019, and watching it now feels eerily prescient. Not because Davies predicted specific events, but because he understood how social and technological pressures amplify each other. That’s what the best speculative fiction does — it doesn’t predict the future so much as examine the present more clearly.
I’ve been thinking about what connects all these shows beyond just being on HBO. They all treat their sci-fi concepts as starting points rather than endpoints.
The robots in *Raised by Wolves* aren’t there to show off special effects — they’re there to explore questions about faith and child-rearing. The space setting in *Avenue 5* isn’t about rocket ships — it’s about class conflict in enclosed spaces.
Maybe that’s what makes HBO’s approach to science fiction work. They’re not trying to out-spectacle *Star Wars* or out-weird *Black Mirror*. They’re using speculative elements to dig deeper into human stories, often in ways that feel more intimate than epic.
Next time someone asks about sci-fi worth watching, I won’t just point them toward the obvious choices. Sometimes the best discoveries are the shows that don’t announce themselves with laser battles and alien invasions. Sometimes they sneak up on you with questions you weren’t expecting to think about.
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